This paper offers evidence of the asymmetric effect of monetary policy on economic activity. First, asymmetric adjustment is captured in three macroeconomic relationships for investment, the consumer price deflator, inventories and house prices. These relationships are then embedded in a small...

The recently examined durability-asymmetry hypothesis of Cook (1999) is re-evaluated using the diagnostic tests of time deformation proposed by Stock (1987, 1988). An application of these tests to disaggregated data on U.S. consumers' expenditure provides further support for this hypothesis,...

In this paper three hypotheses concerning the cyclicality of U.S. consumers' expenditure are proposed. These hypotheses are based upon the distinction between expenditure on durable and non-durable goods. It is argued that durability will lead to increased cyclical sensitivity and that this...

The finite-sample properties of threshold autoregressive cointegration tests are examined in the presence of structural changes in cointegrating relationships. It is shown that spurious asymmetric cointegration may be exhibited when there is a change in the degree of cointegration between two...

The properties of the 'change in persistence'' tests developed by Leybourne et al. (2003) are considered in the presence of structural change under the null. Interestingly, it is found that while breaks in drift result in undersizing, breaks in level lead to severe oversizing. The implications...

Cook et al. (1998) have recently proposed the hypothesis of a positive relationship between the durability of consumers' expenditure and the asymmetric behaviour it exhibits. Some support was found for this hypothesis via the application of Sichel's (1993) univariate tests of business cycle...

Recent developments in the analysis of cointegration in the presence of asymmetric adjustment are extended and applied to data on regional house prices in the UK. This extension is found to have a dramatic impact upon the results derived. In contrast to recent studies employing standard methods,...

In a recent examination of the integrated nature of inflation, Culver and Papell (Journal of Applied Econometrics, 1997) applied a range of unit root and stationarity tests to data from a panel of 13 OECD economies. The results obtained were mixed. While little evidence of stationarity was...

The finite-sample properties of recently proposed range unit root tests are examined in the presence of serial correlation and drift. The results obtained show that both tests suffer from severe size distortion when applied to unit root process which either possess serially correlated...